Thursday, January 17, 2013

Getting Photographs To My Nexus 7 And My OTG Cable Rant

One of the things I want to do with my Nexus 7 is edit photos while on the road and upload them to Flickr or Facebook. The one thing the Nexus is missing is an SD card slot. What to do?

What to do turns out to be quite simple. I even learned how to do it before I even bought my Nexus 7. You need three things to get your pictures from the camera to the tablet.

An USB card reader capable of reading your camera's card. In my case I needed an SDHC reader which I already had. Bought it a while back so I could read my camera's card while I was on the road. I even used it in Jordan for that exact purpose.

An On-The-Go (OTG) USB cable. This five and a half inch cable (see the accompanying picture) allows you to connect a standard USB connector to a mini-USB connector. The OTG USB cable is rather easy to find. I found mine on Amazon. It's cheap. I have more to say about this later in the post.

That's all you need. Now I can import pictures while I'm on the go. I found a free app called Pixlr Express that does a great job at editing photos. With an available WiFi connection I can send the edited pictures to Flickr, Facebook, or just about anywhere I want.

On-The-Go USB Cable

Now more about the OTG cable. This is going to be a minor rant. More of a slap you forehead "What are they thinking?" type moment.

When I bought my new backup drives (after my NAS crash), I bought them at Best Buy. I did this because I was more in a hurry, and less price conscious, than usual. When I bought them I received a $10.00 gift card - a promotion from Western Digital, the makers of the drives. I've wandered around Best Buy looking for something to buy with this gift card and have come away empty handed. I just couldn't find anything I wanted. Once I bought my tablet I thought about the OTG cable. My local store didn't have one but I did find it at BestBuy.com (strangely enough I can't seem to find it there anymore). They were selling the cable for $5.00 and change plus tax with free in store pickup. I would have bought it but I lost my gift card (long story short I found it later in the snow next to our garbage can).

Not having any free money I searched for another source. I found it on Amazon (they have everything in the world) ... for $0.82 ... no tax ... free shipping ... from Hong Kong. That's right. Over $5.40 from the local store or $0.82 from a store half way around the world. Same cable, same manufacturer.

Now I know why Best Buy is slowly dying and why the world economy is in such a mess - Everything just doesn't make any sense at all.

Now I just need to find something at Best Buy to spend my free money on before it takes its last breath.